By Vicki Delany
What prompted this little bit of insightful wisdom from me
was this video.
Watch it until the end.
What struck me so much about this was the lack of panic. People are driving though a fire storm like
they’re heading to the office or the mall.
Police are directing traffic as fire rains down around them, and everyone
waits their turn.
And no one (so far, except for a young woman killed in a car
accident) has been hurt. An entire city
of 80,000 evacuated in a fire storm and no one is dead or injured.
I can only think that it’s because no one panicked, and if
they did there were people around to calm them down.
When people panic, then people die. Keep
calm and carry on might be a trite saying for coffee mugs and T-shirts, but in
this instance it worked.
Easy for me to say of course, because I am not in the thick
of things, and who knows how any of us would react until the time comes.
Good job, Fort McMurrayites.
For an insiders-view of the evacuation, my friend and
fellow-writer Kevin Thornton has a good piece in the New York Times:
2 comments:
Great post, Vicki. I would have had to dig deep to stay calm in that situation. But I do have a "Stay Calm" sign on the counter beside the stove to look at as I sip my morning tea and encounter much less stressful days.
Thanks, Vicki. A good lesson to us all. Cool heads in crisis have saved many a day.
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